Zen and the Art of Speedskating

The bicycle and I are old friends. After spending a decade of my life competing in 450+ bicycle races, maybe it’s more appropriate to describe this particular old friend as an abusive co-dependent sweat & endorphin-drinking buddy.

Here is me and my old friend in 1991, racing through the rainy streets of Boston right next to the Charles river. But I shouldn’t complain too much about this old friend, or the crazy things we used to do, I still have both collarbones intact, and more fond memories than crash stories.

I ride my Powercranks indoors during wintertime, but owing to how brutally cold this winter has been and my focusing on the ice speedskating season, it’s been months since I rode outdoors.

However, today, 55 degrees!! Omigosh!!!

I could almost hear my single speed road bike howling with uncaged titanium joy as I wheeled it from the garage.

Within a few minutes I was bopping through the hills of the Avenues District of Salt Lake. However I was surprised to feel the bike was an imposter between me and speed; the handlebars were rudely intruding into my field of vision, and I felt like a dumb motor turning the gear(s) on a machine.

I never feel that when skating. When skating I am flying, free, willing myself into velocity and skimming across the land like a cruise missile (well, a slow missile, Mr stopwatch tells me I am still skating like crap).

A wonderfully written and fascinating blog, Fat Cyclist, had this quote about riding recently.

I love the climb because the descent payoff is incredible. The curves come at you nonstop as you’re descending as fast as you dare to go, making bets with yourself as to what your tires’ limits of adhesion are.

If you get into a descending groove, you stop feeling like your bike is something you’re riding.

Instead, it’s something you are.

It’s been so long that I’ve been away from bike racing, that this feeling is a hazy memory. Or maybe there is only enough room in a soul to feel that about one thing at a time, as I have heard similar ecstatic descriptions of driving a sports car, horse jumping, etc…

There will be time to find the bike again this summer. Since I don’t plan to be leaping about in the lactic acid blast furnace of dryland training, I am looking forward to knobbily skipping my way across the slickrock in Moab, or leaning through twisting canyons near my house, feeling those wild changes of air temperature as a climb-sweat soaked body plummets downward through the swirling mix of rising desert heat & sinking mountain air.

Sigh…. Like so many, I am an addict of that moment, that oneness with velocity. I am never sure if it’s the moment itself that is peaceful, or that one finds peace after feeling those moments.

Sometimes a man can be dated as surely by his athletic gear as he can by his favorite band during high school. Here is a photo of my single-speed’s drivetrain.

If there are any other old-school bike snobs like myself reading this, I give them one guess as to who was president when I was most active as a racer.

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Filed under: from home

Pictured below, friend Jannicke Mikkelsen skating on a fjord in Norway…

However she is missing a crucial piece of equipment in this lovely photo taken on sea ice…

For more images of her actually skating in gorgeous scenery, dodging cargo ships, describing falling into the North sea, and some excellent pictures of the recent World Sprint Championships in Hamar check out her website

Claiming to speak for a group of people is usually a prescription for trouble, but I can confidently say on behalf of the Salt Lake City skate tribe:

“Janni, you are missed… Good luck and we hope to see you back here someday!!”

Speaking of being cold, the little toes on my left foot got a dash of frostbite last weekend. It’s not bad, but it reminds me of Minnesota with every ouchy step (and hack/cough, I am still sick).

Dano & Colton Barrett’s father Dan emailed me this image of the very cold master men 30-39 category doing our best impersonation of “skate ninjas.” We are in the first 50 meters of the 500 here. From L to R you have Mike Anderson, Tony Morabito, Mark Yanagihara, and myself.

Technically, there are some interesting things going on in this photo. It’s hard as a sprinter to “get over your skate” between pushes, and then create big pressure into the ice when stepping. They are opposite moments of balance that need to be executed at “blender” footspeed.

Mike and I are in the “over the skate” moment and Mark and Tony are in the “big pressure” moment. Tony stayed right on my shoulder all the way down the 100m, and Mike barely passed him at the finish line. I think Mark hit the wall somewhere during this 500m journey.

I need to shorten my arm swing a bit and turn that glide skate to be pointing directly down the ice, World Masters Speedskating Championships in Calgary is less that 3 weeks away!

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Filed under: from the coffee shop

Am… exausted… long.. day… bitter… cold…. windy… ugh… lots of suffering on the ice today.. a hard, hard, day to race outdoors.. Trevor Marsicano is feeling it in his 5k here, he went quite fast through the pain. .

So with a minimum of fuss, here are the results for the final day of Junior national speedskating championships. When I went to take pictures of the results, someone had removed the men’s 1500m and ladies 1,000m.

So here is what I have:

Junior Men Overall

Junior Women Overall

Junior Men C 1500m

Junior Men 5000m

Junior Women 3,000m

P.S. the midway speedskating club has posted the offical .pdf results of the races here.

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Filed under: on the road

These photos are from a meet this past weekend, at the Petoskey, Michigan, outdoor long track.

In this below photo, I can almost taste that sharp-midwest chill coming out of the cold deep blue sky. You can also see photographer Tom Cole’s shadow highlighted by the low-angle winter sun.

Click on each of these photos for a bigger version.

I once thought that this was a track made out of a pond. The truth is more interesting. What Michigan speedskaters do is pack the snow over a soccer field, and then flood it to create this track.

You can see a race starting in the distance, and that odd phenomena of the light-caught skate tracks in ice, a bit like curving meteors.

The European standard has always been 400m. American long tracks in the past were sometimes quite a bit shorter. I have heard Petoskey is 300m.

Here are 3 determined skaters, racing in appropriate outdoor warm gear (unlike me, a finnish blog about competitive swimming recently poked good-natured fun at my freezing in lake placid).

Thanks again, go out to Tom for these photos.

Some might scoff at a small outdoor track, built over a soccer field, comparing it to the massive indoor facilities. How much good can it do?

I think the answer is PLENTY. Every place where skaters can gather and train/race together is a good thing. It creates community, strong clubs, friendships & fun racing.

Even if all you care about is the USA medal count at the Olympics (and there are many who only measure success this way) if there are enough clubs/communities out there, then when a phenomenal athlete who has national caliber ability comes along, he/she will find existing coaches, mentors, and somewhere to train where skaters gather. If they don’t have this, then they find another sport to excel in.

The most current visible Petoskey alumnus that I know of at the National Level is Matt Hotchkiss. He races strongly in both short and long track. Here is an image of him competing at the America’s cup this past December, during the last 800m of a 5k.

Repeat his experience over and over, in tracks all over the USA, you create a strong national scene. A hot national scene is the forge that smelts ambition and talent into world-class skaters. Create enough world-class skaters, then you will find that tiny number of special individuals who become Olympic medalists.

Who then inspire the whole cycle to begin again, in places like Petoskey, Michigan.

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Filed under: from home

The new picture on the header of the blog, of my skates cutting through the water, is thanks to the previously mentioned Shadowcatcher LTD photos from the Jack Shea Sprint classic.

I think they have a ton of photos, far more than they posted. If you were one of the skaters at that meet, give them a ring, they might have the ultimate photo of you.

Here is a serious question: When I meet folks who read this blog, I often ask “what do you like the best about this blog? What would you like to see more of?” Usually the answer I get goes something like “I like the variety & unpredictable blend of stuff, keep doing what you are doing”.

The 600-700 unique visitors every day, from all over the world, makes me think this site hit some nerve. “ZATAOSS” (as a friend of mine calls this site) started out a very personal thing, I just wanted to keep my friends & family up to date with what I was doing, and capture my experience leading up to Olympic trials so I could look back on it in 20 years & have a good laugh.

But now it’s something else, a continually evolving thing. Maybe it’s a side effect of the sad fact that the total number of decent speedskating sites written in English is maybe a dozen. A sad number for a beautiful sport that deserves far better.

So for my small part to do better, and be the change, I have just been posting whatever seems fun. Right now video is fun, so I have been playing around with that (it’s worth mentioning a HUGE thanks to the folks who contributed to the tip jar! YOU made it possible!!).

If folks have opinions/ideas, I’d love to hear them. As I sadly scale back my own full-time devotion to skating, due to the hairy-clawed beast of financial necessity, this site will by necessity change, but how it will change remains to be seen.

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Filed under: from the coffee shop